The unidentified man who plummeted to his death from the wheel well of a JFK-bound jet last week was the latest in a growing number of airline stowaway tragedies.

There have been six reported airline stowaway deaths so far this year – and no known survivors, said Arlene Salac, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Last year, there were 10 reported deaths and three known survivors.

The odds of survival are long, according to the FAA.

Airline wheel-well stowaways have to contend with altitude-related lack of oxygen, temperatures as low as 81 degrees below zero, and the possibility of being crushed to death when the landing gear retracts.

Then there are those like the unidentified man who plummeted from a London-to-New York jet last Tuesday after its landing gear was deployed. He crashed to the ground outside an Island Park, L.I., restaurant.

The same thing happened last year to a stowaway whose body was found in nearby Long Beach, L.I.

Although most airline stowaways are aware of the danger, officials and relatives say they take the risk in a desperate bid to flee poverty or political repression.

“He could not stand this system,” Lucia Garcia of Havana, Cuba, said in 1999 after her son, Felix, froze to death on a London-bound plane.

This January, two other young Cubans died the same way.

When the bodies of two West African youths were found in the wheel well of a plane in Belgium in 1999, officials discovered a letter wrapped in their clothing explaining that they expected to die and begging Europeans to help young Africans.

Among those who have survived was a Tahitian man who lived despite having his core body temperature lowered to 79 degrees during a seven-hour flight to Los Angeles last year.